Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren As President JOE BIDEN’s helicopter descended on Miyajima Island just south of Hiroshima last Friday night, a group of journalists trailed him in a helicopter nearby. They took note of the dense woods below and the deer gamboling about indifferent to the whir of Marine One’s rotor blades. For that small group of reporters and photographers, it was about as interesting as anything they’d seen on the first day of the G-7 summit. That’s because they hadn’t seen much else at all. Widespread complaints about limited press access were common among the reporters who accompanied the president on his trip to Japan. As Biden sat down for dinner that night with other leaders, an administration official was briefing reporters on a Zoom call about all that had occurred behind closed doors and what they should expect the following day. When it came time for questions, Bloomberg’s JORDAN FABIAN, who’d spent the day in the travel pool, made the pool’s frustrations clear. “You just said that, you know, we're going to see a lot of things happen at the summit. But the reality is that the media covering the President hasn't been able to see much of anything,” Fabian said. “How is the White House planning to make sure the American public knows, you know, what the President is doing here?” The official brushed the question aside, blaming Japan, the host country, for the limited press access. But concerns like Fabian’s are likely to lead to a post-mortem meeting between Biden’s team and the White House Correspondents’ Association once everyone is back in Washington. The initial frustrations stemmed largely from the pool being almost entirely shut out of a “photo spray,” when the small group of reporters and photojournalists are allowed into a meeting to capture images and the opening remarks from participants — and, in most cases, to shout questions at them. When G-7 leaders gathered for their first working lunch Friday inside a cavernous, shoreside hotel in Hiroshima Bay, only one photographer was allowed in. That prompted a phone call from one of the poolers, the New York Times’ longtime White House reporter PETER BAKER, to WHCA president TAMARA KEITH. Roused near midnight back in Washington, Keith explained that Japan had imposed severe restrictions on G-7 press coverage and that she, as the press corps’ elected representative, had determined that a still photographer, not a reporter, should be the pool’s representative in that particular spray because the leaders were not expected to speak. Pool reporters were subsequently passed a television feed of the meeting only to see that Japanese Prime Minister KISHIDA FUMIO was, in fact, making remarks. In the past, White House correspondents have fought against having only a photographer in a pool when reporters are barred, wary of establishing any precedent that might enable an administration to seek out positive images while avoiding difficult questions. The pool did see Biden at various points over the final two days of the summit, and a shouted question about debt talks from Bloomberg’s JENNY LEONARD did elicit a newsy response from the president. But there were few of those opportunities, as numerous meetings that would typically have been open to the full pool were restricted to one representative or a smaller subset. Japanese officials at one point on Saturday informed U.S. officials that sprays they thought would be open to two reporters had been reduced to one, citing a decision from the local fire marshall. On Sunday, as press wranglers prepared to lead the one-person pool to observe the official photo of the G-7 leaders with Ukrainian President VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, they initially gave the pool card for that event — essentially, the admission ticket — to the print pooler, COURTNEY SUBRAMANIAN of the LA Times. But quickly they took it back, following another WHCA directive, and gave it to a still photographer, AP’s SUSAN WALSH. Frustrations with covering summits — from holding in narrow hallways or elevator loading docks to jostling with competing journalists for space, to the closed door nature of the gatherings and the 47-page euphemism-laden communiques that come from them — are hardly unique to Hiroshima. But journalists who went to Japan, traveling at considerable expense, spent much of the weekend buzzing about the uniquely restrictive policies at this annual gathering of the world’s most powerful democratic leaders. That’s especially true for those outlets which remain on the hook for more than half of the expense of a charter flight that would have flown the press corps from Hiroshima to Sydney, Australia had Biden not canceled the second leg of his trip. There was one exception: an off-the-record gathering at the press hotel Friday night that had been organized by the WHCA and was well attended by reporters and several administration officials. MESSAGE US — Are you Homeland Security Adviser ELIZABETH SHERWOOD-RANDALL? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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